How American Fundamentalist Schools Are Using the Loch Ness Monster to Disprove Evolution

IT sounds like a plot dreamed up by the creators of Southpark, but it’s all true: schoolchildren in Louisiana are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid by religious educators to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Making America great a laughing stock again, one wingnut state at a time. To make matters worse, this utter inanity is getting public funding:

Private religious schools, including the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Louisiana, which follows the ACE curriculum, have already been cleared to receive the state voucher money transferred from public school funding, thanks to a bill pushed through by state Governor Bobby Jindal.

Boston-based researcher and writer Bruce Wilson, who specialises in the American political religious right, compares the curriculum to Islamic fundamentalist teaching.

“They are being brought up to believe that they’re at war with secular society. The only valid government would be a Christian fundamentalist government. Obviously some comparisons could be made to Islamic Fundamentalists in schools.

“One of these texts from Bob Jones University Press claims that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons. It has little to do with science as we currently understand. It’s more like medieval scholasticism.”

Wilson believes that such teaching is going on in at least 13 American states.

…a sampling of the extremism promoted by Texas Republicans at their convention this month in Fort Worth. That platform:
The Texas Republican Party Platform: A Biennial Exercise in Extremism
- Declares separation of church and state is a “myth” and calls for Congress to withdraw federal court jurisdiction over cases involving religious freedom and the Bill of Rights.
- Calls for teaching creationist arguments in public school science classrooms
- Opposes the sale and use of emergency contraception and backs the Legislature’s war on women’s health programs.
- Rejects “any sex education other than abstinence until marriage” in public schools.
- Adopts a radical position that would essentially bar abortion even in cases of rape, incest or even to save a woman’s life.
- Advocates for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, minimum wage laws and the Endangered Species Act as well as the abolishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.
- Attacks LGBT Texans as a threat to families and objects to laws that would protect them from job discrimination and hate crimes.
- Calls for further funding cuts for public schools following draconian cuts by lawmakers in 2011.
- Seeks to change the 14th Amendment to limit citizenship by birth only to those born to a U.S. citizen.
- Threatens federal judges with impeachment if they don’t toe the far right’s line in controversial court cases.
- Alarmingly, the party platform also seeks to increase the authority of the highly politicized and dysfunctional State Board of Education over what Texas students learn in their public schools.

It’s become glaringly obvious that an informed voter base will not serve the interests of the GOP and its owners.